We’re just a few days into the NBA playoffs and already, two teams—Milwaukee and Boston—are on the ropes in the Eastern Conference. The odds are long for both teams, but we’re not writing eulogies just yet. Rather, because it’s Wednesday, we’re Throwin’ Elbows here:

Missing Rondo yet?

There is a notion that has floated around Boston in the three months since point guard Rajon Rondo went out with a tear of his ACL, born of the fact that the Celtics rallied in the wake of Rondo’s injury and won seven straight games. The streak gave rise to the assertion that the Celtics are actually better without Rondo, and in the immediate aftermath of the injury, there was little arguing that point—they defended better, they shared the ball, they were much more efficient offensively.

But better? Nope. If the first two games of the playoffs have shown anything, it is that the Celtics’ long-term playoff success requires the presence of their jitterbug point guard. The Celtics followed Game 1’s 78-point, 41.5-percent shooting performance with 71 points on 37.1 percent shooting in Game 2, against a Knicks defense that is middle-of-the-pack, at best.

In the playoffs, when games grind and the pace slows, it’s vital to have a guy who can break down a defense and force opponents out of position. That’s what Rondo did throughout the course of last postseason and it was a key to the Celtics coming within one game of the NBA Finals. The Celtics have no one capable of doing that on the roster. Avery Bradley? Jason Terry? Courtney Lee? No way. Maybe some from Jordan Crawford, but the more Crawford plays, the more you have to accept his questionable shot selection and defense.

Combine the lack of dribble penetration with two other hallmarks of the Celtics offense this year—they’re one of the worst teams in the league when it comes to transition and dead last in offensive rebounds—and this is a team that just can’t get easy baskets.

No question, Rondo was not having a great year when he was healthy. He led the league in assists, but overall, he was too careless with the ball and wasn’t playing sound defense. Watching his teammates function in February and March without him—especially the way they moved the ball and played as a unit—should force Rondo to recognize the flaws in his approach and make him a better, more focused player when he returns next season.

He said in an interview with Hannah Storm two weeks ago that the talk about the team being better without him wasn’t on his mind. “Those guys are like my brothers,” Rondo said. “So I wished them well. No big deal. I wasn’t jealous or buying into people saying they are better without me. If they are, they are but for the most part, I’m still a Celtic.”

Rondo probably should pay a little attention to the talk that his team is better without him. He should use it as motivation, let the ways in which the Celtics are, in fact, better help him recognize aspects of his game that need to be cleaned up.

But watching the Celtics’ offense collapse in the second half of both games against the Knicks should only serve as a reminder of the ways that Rondo has bailed Boston out of stagnant offense in the past, particularly in last season’s playoffs. The Celtics were able to survive the regular season without Rondo—they were 18-20 with him, 23-20 without him—but it looks as though their offense can’t handle his absence here in the playoffs.

In Cleveland, Mike Brown 2.0

Here’s hoping that, this time around, the Cavaliers let Mike Brown be himself. It is hard not to look back on the coaching career of Brown and get the feeling that we still don’t know whether he is the high-quality NBA leader he was expected to be when he first got the job in Cleveland eight years ago.

In Cleveland the first time around, Brown didn’t have much leeway to run the team the way he would have liked. Because the franchise was ever fearful of losing LeBron James to free agency, Brown had little choice but to bend to the whims of James and his representatives. That created an inmates-running-the-asylum atmosphere in Cleveland, and Brown’s authority was ever undermined.

It wasn’t much better for Brown in Los Angeles. The atmosphere was more professional, but Brown was given the task of following up Phil Jackson, which marginalized him in the view of players and fans. The fact that rumors about his job security in LA started up almost as soon as last season ended with a quick first-round exit gave him little chance to handle the onslaught of expectations that arose after the Lakers signed Steve Nash and traded for Dwight Howard.

Brown’s reputation among scouts is that he runs a very solid defensive system but a simplistic offense (which was why the Lakers brought in Princeton-offense maven Eddie Jordan as an assistant, though he's now gone for Rutgers). The Cavs do need to work on their offense, which will be a challenge for Brown, but they’re one of the worst defensive teams in the NBA.

How well he is able to fix that will be the measure of Brown’s second go-round in Cleveland—and much of his success will rely on his ability to be the unquestioned leader of his young team. He should be in better position to assume that role this time around.

Award-voting blues

Sigh.

Every year, awards season in the NBA comes around and every year, there is a general freak-out over the voting process and how the award winners are picked. This year, already, we’ve seen complaints arise about Portland’s Luke Babbitt and Boston’s Jordan Crawford getting votes for Sixth Man of the Year, as well as some surprise that the media selected Marc Gasol as the top defensive player despite his lack of big-time blocked-shot numbers.

Thing is, the media almost always gets these awards right. (Most Improved is an exception, because it is an ill-defined and pretty pointless award.) Was the media really wrong to give Tyson Chandler the DPOY last year, or to Dwight Howard for three years before that, or to Kevin Garnett in 2008? Rookie of the Year is almost always an easy choice. While you could quibble with Sixth Man or Coach choices, none of the winners are ever ridiculously wrong picks.

The same could be said for MVP. There have been controversial votes—Derrick Rose two years ago, Steve Nash’s back-to-back awards in ’05 and ’06—but those picks, too, made sense. Probably the last time the MVP clearly went to the wrong guy was 2001, when Allen Iverson beat out Shaquille O’Neal, or before that, in 1999 when Karl Malone won over some guy named Michael Jordan.

Jordan Crawford getting a vote was likely an error, in which a voter meant to vote for Jamal Crawford. Babbitt’s pick was an outlier, which is going to happen when you have 121 voters casting ballots. In all, though, the consensus behind winners like Gasol and J.R. Smith is hard to argue. The media got it right. As usual.